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I'm glad that the Acid3 test is just a side mention in this story. The recent Firefox betas look great. It needs to be said though that the WebKit builds that score 100/100 are publicly available.
But it also needs to be said that there's a lot more to a web browser than its performance on a single standards test.

You certainly didn't see Apple ship Safari 3.1 with 100 on Acid3. WebKit (more accurately Safari) are at the beginning of a development cycle. They just shipped Safari 3.1 after quite a long dev cycle and are beginning Safari 3.next (or 4?) so it makes sense that they tear into their code in a pretty aggressive way. As far as I can tell, Opera 9.5 due sometime soon also won't pass Acid3. All of this work you're seeing on Acid3 is for the _next_ release, not the current release. (where current is Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5)

>Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*.

Ah, maybe you actually investigate and learn something about this before making ridiculous assertions of fact. Firefox passed Acid2 in a "development release" (dbaron's reflow branch builds absolutely were available as "development releases") precisely two years ago [flickr.com] and trunk builds were passing in early December of 2006 [mozillazine.org].

I don't know about your definition of "just now" or your definition of "development releases" but it seems t

I'm a bit worried about 'giving' google all my history, cookies, and stored passwords, protected by a PIN.Since the PIN is the only thing you need to set up on a new computer, I don't think the data sent to google is encrypted (using a key unknown by google, ie more than https)?

I guess they don't really want my passwords, but the navigation and form history coupled to my search history... brrr... (I don't even want to imagine using gmail too)

I use FoxMarks [foxmarks.com] for bookmark syncing across multiple FF installs. You can also log on the their website from any internet computer and access your bookmarks without installing anything. Now thats useful.

I'm glad there isn't an improvement in their Acid3 score with the latest beta. It means that their release procedure is sane and they aren't introducing regressions right before a big release. Kudos to the devs for not pushing patches for the sake of it.

Beta 4 only scored 68 / 100, so they have made some core changes. They fixed tests 42, 67, and 69. In addition, the test seems to run about 40% faster in B5 vs. B4, at least on my PC.

Yes, Firefox does include a few Gecko fixes that increase the Acid3 score, but not because Firefox 3 is chasing the test. We're focused on getting in the right set of changes between now and ship and that's not going to be defined by Acid3.

Perhaps, but shame on the devs for not announcing a 3.1 release to fix Acid3-compliance as soon as possible after 3.0's release. How I long for the days when standards were a priority on that team.

I think you're confused. The Acid 3 test is not a test for Web standards. It's a test for a particular (and rather small) subset of Web standards. It's not even a representative set of Web standards that would necessarily move the Web forward in meaningful ways if there were compatible implementations across the various browsers.

At Mozilla, we're definitely focused on fixing bugs in our various Web standards feature implementations as well as adding new Web standards capabilities, but we're not going to focus on any one test, especially a test that's designed as much to make browser vendors jump through hoops as much to advance the standards state of the Web.

ACID 3 is symbolic, and it is important to recognize that and not to simply sound grumpy about it.

Well, I'd rather Mozilla contributors worked on issues that were real than issues that were "symbolic".

Mozilla has for 10 years, and continues today, to demonstrate a serious commitment to Web standards. For the better part of the last decade, Mozilla has been the only serious standards advocating competitor to Microsoft and Firefox over the last four years has almost single-handedly revived the standards-based Web.

So, if you think that a failure to drop everything else we're working on (to improve the Open standards-based Web) and start tap dancing for Ian Hickson and his Acid3 test erases our credibility on Web standards, then go ahead thinking that and don't expect me to waste further time trying to change your mind.

Acid 3, just like acid 2, has been released when the firefox development cycle is focusing on stabilizing...other browsers have focused on passing acid3 like it was the most important thing to do and have done ugly things just to be the first, take for example this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410460#c44 [mozilla.org]

And the fact that at least WebKit has introduced a special case for the Acid3font:m_allowFontSmoothing = (nameStr != "Ahem");

And the fact that at least WebKit has introduced a special case for the Acid3 font

That's not the whole story. The Acid3 test assumes specific font-smoothing behaviour (that it doesn't increase the dimensions of the text). This is not always true on OS X and isn't required by any specification. The workaround in Webkit was to guarantee the font-smoothing behaviour that the Acid3 test expected. That font is not a normal font, it's designed specifically for testcases, so both the "bug" and the workaround would not affect normal situations. And the Acid3 test has since been changed to avoid this problem [hixie.ch].

Please include this information when mentioning this "ugly thing", because without the pertinent facts, people assume a number of things that simply aren't true.

Also the Opera team are right in the middle of a stabilisation cycle (9.5 just around the corner) but have managed to develop internal builds which pass Acid 3..Good for Opera. I publicly congratulated them for that work the day they hit 100%.

But what level of support are they shipping in 9.5 and at what cost of delay to the 9.5 release did they make those Opera 9.next or Opera 10 gains?

Are Opera users and web developers going to have to wait weeks or months longer to get a better Opera experience in 9.5 (w

Well, I just downloaded beta 5, and given it a whirl for a few minutes.

Speed and general responsiveness: Massively improved! Page loading is noticeably faster, generally feels snappier, but that might be sensory bias. I did notice, though, that large config panels (particularly in Preferences) are dog slow on first load. This may be a first-run thing, so maybe it will disappear.

Startup was a bit slow, but that may also be due to the fact that it was starting for the very first time.

10.3 -> 10.4 is not a point release, despite what the version number may imply. For example, 10.4 to 10.5 is along the scale of XP to Vista. There are certainly some UI differences, some more extreme than others.

The thing I find mosy annoying about Firefox 3 is that it's STILL not a native cocoa app.

Of course it's not a native cocoa app! It's a XUL app, where XUL is Mozilla's own cross-platform widget toolkit. And it has to be a XUL app, because extensions have to be able to modify the UI and extensions are written in XUL. And extensions have to be written in XUL, because they have to be cross-platform. And Firefox has to support extensions, because otherwise it wouldn't be Firefox anymore.

Bottom line: if you want a Gecko browser that's a native cocoa app, use Camino. If you want a browser that supports extensions, use Firefox. You will never, ever be able to have a single app that does both, because XUL and cocoa are different, incompatible technologies.

I want to try beta 5 out (especially after I found Tab Mix Plus is actually supported [garyr.net]). But my main worry is how they react to bugs found in the beta. Are they continuously releases security updates for betas the same way as the official released version? Or I'd have to wait patiently for the final release which is more than 2 months away?

Also, every time I uninstall firefox 3, I could no longer click links in outlook unless I reset default browser to IE and switch back. This is very irritating.

I haven't been able to find a bug on Moz Bugzilla on the behavior, but both previous betas would occasionally spike in CPU usage after a few hours' of usage, seemingly at random. Restarting the browser clears the problem. It doesn't seem to be a site-specific problem, as rebrowsing the same pages doesn't immediately trigger the spike. Anyone else seeing this? Otherwise, I've been very happy with the FF3's rendering and feature set.

Sounds like it could be a resource manager of Firefox that does some work in the background, makes sense since you say it occurs after a few hours use and that it disappears if you restart it (thus removing all of Firefox's allocated resources from RAM).

Minutes. I've hit this bug before, and on my Sempron (shut up I'm in college) it knocks the computer out cold and hangs everything, and I was forced to reset the computer. It happens randomly, and repeatedly, and if you don't restart firefox it gets worst until the whole computer freezes; at first it just freezes the computer a little and then lets up but then the time it takes to make it free again increases.

Could you comment in bug 425079 [mozilla.org] and attach your localStore.rdf, as described in comment 16 [mozilla.org]? It would help a lot - we have a workaround fix, but we're trying to figure out the root cause.

That's a good point, parent. Because most users know how and why to change default connection settings, especially if they're operating through a proxy, by going into about:config and manually editing variables. Obviously, for the common user, there is absolutely no need to alter default settings.

Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?I mean Firefox has had some nasty memory leaks for the longest time and absolutely I would love to see those fixed. But it seems like this is more than just that, it seems like some big epeen contest between browsers.

Memory is perhaps the second cheapest commodity on a modern day PC after disk space. If they get too deep into this then it wouldn't surprise me to see them off-set this reduced usage with increased CPU time or disk seek times (which is destruc

Since people started doing more "wep apps" (and memory usage skyrocketed as a result) and since mobile devices started becoming a real browsing platform. RAM on those is not all that plentiful, so far.

Note that the work to reduce memory usage in Firefox has thus far led to performance improvement, most likely due to better cache coherency. There _have_ been some optimizations to reduce memory usage at the cost of more CPU usage (largely to do with how long decoded 4-bytes-per-pixel representations of images are kept in memory), but most of the memory usage improvements have been due to using a better allocator and fixing leaks. There is no "must have the smallest memory usage around" goal; as you note other considerations are at least as important.

I'm not sure if you recall reading the comments to any other story about Firefox on Slashdot or Digg or Ars or virtually anywhere else in the past two years, but about 90% of those comments discussed memory usage. The Firefox team is doing a good job responding to its user base. They have not, to my knowledge, had to sacrifice speed or additional features to achieve lower memory usage.

Depends on your OS. My Mac has 2 gigs, so I never have to worry about it. Even if I have Parallels open and using 768MB or 1GB, it's fine.

XP is different.

Way back in the 9x days, I used a little program called MemTurbo (by Silicon Prairie Software, I think). It made a HUGE difference in system performance. Windows was just terrible at managing memory. MemTurbo would defrag your memory so that larger chunks were available. You could trigger it yourself, or have it trigger when a certain amount of memory wa

Uh, you have noticed all the people crying that Firefox is a bloated memory hog, haven't you? The ones that have been demanding that Firefox use less memory? I guess you should be careful what you wish for. Personally, I agree that it's been made a much bigger deal than is necessary. I wish Firefox developers would spend more time on other fixes, as memory use is far from being an issue for me. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have caused performance

The ridiculous memory use is the #1 reason that it's sometimes 30 seconds between when I click and when Firefox responds. Swapping is _slooooow_, and even if you don't hit swap you're trashing the cache and killing responsiveness (which you seem to value).

I think it has pretty much always been a big deal. Unless you have plenty of memory, memory is likely to be the limiting factor on the performance of your system. In extreme cases, memory shortage can cause programs to not work at all. Firefox has been a notorious memory hog. So I am _very_ glad to see this addressed. I might actually start using it again.

>>If we're comparing a Firefox beta then we may>>as well look at a newer version of Safari, too.>>The latest nightly builds of WebKit get 100/100>>on Acid3. http://webkit.org/blog/173/ [webkit.org]

Actually, that's not quite fair. Firefox 3 beta 5 is the final beta and it's basically done. It will be a shipping browser at the same time as Safari 3.1. Comparing shipping browsers with nearly simultaneous releases (only a few months apart) is an eminently reasonable thing to do.

The Safari number (100/100, pixel-perfect result) is for the WebKit nightly builds, which can be downloaded from the WebKit site or built by checking the code out of the (public) svn repository. This is directly comparable to a FireFox beta, since both are publicly available but not officially called releases. Since Apple isn't the only one to use WebKit (Nokia do and there are also GTK and Qt bindings now) I wouldn't be surprised if someone other than Safari gets better results by using a newer version o

I'm sure somebody is likely to bring it up, so it may as well be me with some additional relevant facts. The HTTP 1.1 specification, RFC 2616 [ietf.org], says [ietf.org] that:

Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.

This "improved connection parallelism" is simply changing Firefox from using the RFC-suggested 2 persistent connections, to 6. Now, SHOULDs and SHOULD NOTs are not set in stone, but they do require careful thought before ignoring.

The Bugzilla entry [mozilla.org] debating this has a comment [mozilla.org] that points out that other browsers have also started to ignore this part of the specification:

I agree that specification recommendations should not be ignored without careful consideration. However, I think the jump from 2 to 6 makes a lot of sense after almost 10 years of adhering to the specification and I don't think that it was done without careful consideration. Web servers and bandwidth have both strongly moved forward, and that specific suggestion in the RFC was just that. A suggestion. In the context of 1999.

I think the jump from 2 to 6 makes a lot of sense after almost 10 years

Not all movement has been in the forward direction. Back them, most web traffic was totally static, even the HTML. These days, it's far more likely that the HTML is generated dynamically from something like mod_php. This, in turn, means that rather than tying up a slim process, a persistent connection ties up a "fat" process with a language runtime embedded in it. Three times as many simultaneous persistent connections means up

I mean, Firefox is just a front end to Gecko, right? Back when the Mozilla suite was the focus of the Mozilla foundation and Firefox was just a side project, Firefox development effected Gecko development very little. Is this still true even with the focus shift from the Mozilla suite to Firefox?

I do know that Firefox nightlies DO NOT equal webkit nightlies. Firefox and Gecko are actually devoloped on separate branches and are only merged at intervals.

OK, I tried the hardy beta upgrade a few days back, complete with FF3b4. Totally hosed my system, forcing a reinstall. Not sure how much of the problem was with hardy & how much was with FF3b4, but I know for a fact that I won't upgrade til FF3 comes out of beta.

I didn't have back & forth arrows, no home button, and most of the extensions I use on a daily basis didn't work. Neither did the themes. Updates didn't work. And I couldn't edit my bookmarks.

I'm wondering how the new releases of distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are going to handle not having a stable version of Firefox 3.0 until June.
Currently Ubuntu is using beta 4 for the hardy beta, will the plan be to revert back to FF2 when hardy becomes stable or release with a beta version of FF3?

What I badly need is a replacement for that awful Flash player. There is so much Flash content on the web now, that unfortunately I need a viewer for this. Firefox 2 is fine. The need for better/faster viewing or more features is not very big.

So please Mozilla foundation: If you want to do something to improve my web exprerience just put some effort into Swfdec or Gnash or do something from scratch and put it into Firefox.

It's not hideous - sometimes I only remember titles of pages, and other times only the last parts of the URL. The fact that remembering those things counts for something in Firefox (and gets me to my destination faster) makes me far more likely to use it, both here at work on Win2k and at home on my Macs.

Lots of the changes in Firefox 3 with regard to bookmarking are in acknowledgment that the current way of bookmarking isn't as efficient as it should be so users DO go and do what you do, just google for their sites.

The star is a one-click bookmark. You can file it later if you want, or just use the "smart" bookmark features.

The awesomebar is basically a search engine for your bookmarks and history. I really don't see why people hate it. If you want to type in a URL without your pr0n sites showing up, clear your history! But seriously... you enter in a key word or key words, and all sites which have some connection with it pop up, with them intelligently ranked based on how often you visit those sites. Even if you just type in URLs you'll find as soon as you type in the "h" of "http" your most frequently typed urls you started typing with "http" in the past will appear! I used to manually type in the address to planet.mozilla.org to go there. Now I just tap h and it's right there by the top for me. The AwesomeBar is designed to make it easier to find your bookmarks and history items.

And if you don't like it... that's why we have extensions [mozilla.org].

The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.

We like it to autocomplete the url that we're typing so disabling it completely is a step backwards but the new behaviour seems dumb.

Example: I've typed in web, am I more likely to be looking for "xkcd - A *web*comic of..." or "GameFAQs... Video games *web* site..", perhaps I want "Lets turn this fucking *web*site yellow" or "Rapidshare: 1-Click *Web*hosting" or maybe, just maybe, I've started typing in webmail.bath.ac.uk like I do reasonably often (but probably not as much as I visit xkcd or GameFAQs).

I admit, web is a very generic word so this is quite an extreme example but I find that when typing in urls into the address bar, the awesome bar is a lot worse at bringing up the rest of the address you're typing.

Side note: I really like the idea of an integrated search for bookmarks and history, it is more useful than I would have thought but it already exists in the history panel (which I have appear in my sidebar). If they wanted to draw attention to it, would it have killed them to integrate it into the search box and make the search box itself more of a central feature? I mean, when I want to search, I use the search bar or hit my google bookmark on the toolbar, I don't type what I'm looking for in the address bar.

I'm able to enjoy the feature now, and I find it useful. This mode should be configurable, as well as reverting to a "dumb" URL text search if that suits your habits. Otherwise, this annoyance has the potential to drive away users, because every time you type a URL the awesomebar will assault you.

Being a Wikipedian myself, I looked for some extension to let me go directly to a Wikipedia article, and I eventually found it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/443 [mozilla.org] The way I configured this extension, you can just enter some lemma in the address bar and then Ctrl-Enter takes you to the Wikipedia article. It is quite useful because you don't have to use the mouse to go to the Google/Yahoo/Wikipedia-field. And if the article does not exist, it goes to the site anyway and doesn't redirect to the

Some people do a LOT of their web-browsing with their mouse. From what I've seen (I did some repair work for a while and would often have people SHOW me what their problem was, which means I saw their habits), this is actually quite probably the majority of 'regular people.' This means that they often only have one hand on the keyboard (and one on the mouse). For those people, the horribly named Awesomebar is MUCH more convenient than browser history. They have to either move their other hand to the keyb

And it's essentially OSX only. Unless I missed the memo, the Windows version is still pretty much a waste in all respects. At least FF3 will run properly on more than just one OS.Most of the other points are completely irrelevant as few people are going to plunk down hundreds of dollars to ditch a free web browser for a different one. Perhaps if somebody were completely split down the middle of Mac v., PC, this would make some sort of difference, but for the vast majority of people, it just isn't a realisti

Agreed. I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

URLs are the key to http IMO - they're the ones to keep in memory as they're unique, unlike page titles and bookmarks. When I type "sla" in the address bar, I want slashdot.org, not some random blog post with the term 'slashdot' in the title I happened to pass by at some point.

At the end, what pisses me off the most about this whole deal is not being able to revert to the old behavior. That kind of forced nurturing is what I'd expect from Microsoft, not Mozilla.

URLs are the key to http IMO - they're the ones to keep in memory as they're unique, unlike page titles and bookmarks. When I type "sla" in the address bar, I want slashdot.org, not some random blog post with the term 'slashdot' in the title I happened to pass by at some point.

It learns from past behavior, so once you go to Slashdot a couple of times via that method, you'll get slashdot.org. That said, I agree with you that the old functionality should be there too.

Problem with that is, for one example, when you have two 'favourite' websites that get used equally - one being Ebay, and one being your banks website. When I type 'online', I expect to see my banks website URL as the first choice (as it starts with 'online'), and yet the 'awesomebar' persists in putting Ebay as the first choice, because its the 'worlds online market place'.

I have *never* chosen Ebay in that instance, and yet it persists as the top choice in the list. Precisely the sort of behaviour that we are talking about.

Like 'FreakinSyco' says you can hover your mouse over the drop-down-list of options and press the delete button. This works for google search too, if you want to remove any search terms that, er, people shouldn't see.

I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

Which is why the awesomebar is going to be a big success in the Real World (outside of slashdot). You know, real people don't care about what a URL is, and I can't find a reason why t

is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

No, it's aimed at people who understand and can leverage search-based interfaces. I freaking love that I can type *just the different/interesting fragment* of a recent/popular URL and typically have FF3 just dredge it up for me. Yes, there's some culture shock when you first use it... but for my purposes its been fast and rockingly useful. As for "awesomebar"... well, we all roll that "1" on the cool-naming die once and awhile.

I know you've been modded insightful, and I'm not going to necessarily disagree with that. The "Awesomebar" (meh on the name) is not for everybody. It's definitely a different way of thinking.

However, I have been using and testing Firefox 3 Betas pretty significantly. Personally, I'm very much enjoying the Awesomebar. I tend not to use bookmarks all that often - it's nicer to just start typing and, based on how I browse, the site I want to go to is usually at the very top of the list. The Awesomebar has also been helpful when I haven't been able to quite remember the site I want to go to. I start typing, and the site is usually listed somewhere near the top.

Either way, it would be cool if there was an option to shut off the Awesomebar (for those people who don't like it) - but a new way to do something does not necessarily make it hideous.

From my experience with beta 4 it works fine when you turn off compatibility checking. The only broken extension I'm run into is Cookie Safe, but CS Lite fixes most of the problems (not all it seems, it still hangs but rarely enough to be hard to isolate). As said this is with beta 4, not beta 5, so your mileage my differ.So far these betas have been surprisingly good. Once I isolated the Cookie Safe issue, I hardly break 300k of memory usage (6 hours of regular browsing). I still get some odd CPU usage

Because you care about competition. Once you stop caring about competition, you get sideswiped just like IE has been by Firefox. The whole idea is to have a plural browser environment in which each browser vendor competes to deliver the best standards compliance and the best feature set. If you only care about Firefox, you may be missing the point. We can measure Firefox's progress objectively (against its own past performance), but we also need to assess its progress relative to other browsers so that we can assure it remains competitive, and can (at the very least) hold its ground in market share. No one wants to return to the old days of browser monoculture and stagnation.

Those are probably private builds ATM. The latest public Opera scores 78 for me... I THINK I have the latest public build, at least. The site I get my download news from might not update for each build maybe.

Yes, but those are very early development builds of those browsers. They haven't even seen an alpha release, much less a beta. The "Opera" build was actually using the WinGogi interface for Presto, and the Opera developers said not to use those builds for everyday browsing. You would want to compare those browsers to Firefox 4 nightly builds. However, I don't think work has even started on Firefox 4 yet. I opted to compare Firefox 3 to the recently released Safari 3.1 and the soon-to-be released Opera 9.5.

Opera, on an internal build, got 100/100 (this isn't a percentage, there are two other aspects to Acid3 - pixel perfect placement and animation smoothness).

Safari got 100/100 a day later, but in the process discovered a flaw in the Acid3 test that had to be fixed, making Opera's score 99/100. Safari is at least available in a nightly version. Apparently it also got pixel perfect placement and the animation was arguably smooth.

I don't personally think it counts until it's a full non-beta release.

very early (pre-alpha, i believe) builds of opera and webkit have hit 100/100, and AFAIK, the opera build that does that feat isn't even publicly available. the numbers they're showing are for browsers that are actually available and usable.

Firefox will not crash due to a badly implemented web site. Firefox will crash only due to a bug in Firefox or software that is running inside the Firefox process that you have installed on your computer, such as an extension, plugin, driver, or the operating system itself, or in some circumstances, a hardware problem. Is Firefox crashing often for you? If so, follow this advice [mozillazine.org].